Abroad in Thailand

Wow! This post is coming to you deep in the middle of my second block of my Culture, Ecology and Community semester program; Agriculture, in Mae Tha, Thailand.

You may not have heard of Mae Tha before. Well, I hadn’t either, before learning I was coming here! We are staying here for approximately a week and a half, and our last stop was for four days in another, more remote village called Don Jiang. Our goal is to learn more about sustainable agriculture from Thai farmers, many of whom grow their own organic crops! Mae Tha is renowned for its successful system promoting and teaching about organic farming to its residents, so we have a lot to learn from the people here about how we can bring this back to America (hopefully). We have done so much, from transecting an agroforest, to doing soil testing, to learning how the community saves their own seeds.

I have been doing a homestay with a host family in Mae Tha, namely, Mae Yaan. She is my host mom (as well as my homestay sister’s, Ayanna), and she is so incredibly sweet. She does not speak any English, so I have had to communicate with the little Thai I know from living here for about a month and a half. I have (hopefully) been able to communicate my appreciation for her using phrases like, “Arroi!!” (Delicious!) and “Khup Kuhn ka!” (Thank you!) She makes delicious food, and serves us something new every meal that we are at the house (breakfast and dinner). She bought us both shoes to wear inside the house, to maintain the cleanliness of the spotless floor she works hard to maintain.

There is a cat living here who is so old and raggedly (my mom would love him) and he only has one eye. He often approaches me with a low pitched, insistent meow, and Mae shoos him away when she sees him because he is (probably) covered in fleas.

He is one of several animals who wander around Mae’s house. In fact, there are packs of dogs that wander up and down the streets at night, and they will run at you with their teeth bared if you walk down the street by yourself. Ayanna and I went for a run yesterday and we were chased by a pack of dogs, and we had to shoo them away by clapping at them and yelling.

Today, we learned about chocolate! All 13 of us in the program plus our two krus (teachers) on the expedition with us took an hour and a half car ride to Audiva Craft Chocolate. We first visited the farm where they grow the cacao organically (no pesticides) which was brilliant. It is a small farm, maintained by about 7 people in total. We learned about the several steps to creating chocolate, from harvesting the cacao pods to the finished chocolate bar. We also learned about how the other parts of the cacao plant are turned into byproducts and sold, for example: cacao juice made from the mucin of the plant that surrounds the seed. The farm is also totally regenerative, meaning that the waste produced goes back into the system. The cacao pods are used as food for a group of chickens whose poop is used for fertilizer for the crops grown.

After we checked out the farm, we got to do a chocolate tasting (yum!) with Jonathan, a local chocolatier, as well as visit the Audiva cafe, where they sell products created with the chocolate that the farm produces. I got a delicious mocha from the cafe that was admittedly mostly coffee, but it was still delicious. At the chocolate tasting, we were taught how to taste different notes within the chocolate, and learned that every chocolatier produces their own unique flavor of chocolate due to the conditions the cacao was raised in. For example, A chocolate bar might have notes of rum, or strawberry, or even herbs.

We got to tour the behind-the-scenes at the Audiva cafe, where we witnessed the chocolate production. It is made on a very small scale, meaning that it is very high quality, and the makers ensure that the original quality of the bean is preserved in the taste. We saw everything from the drying process, to the storage, to the roasting, as well as the grinding, tempering and finally, the storage.

Overall, this day focused on cacao made me realize how much I truly want to get into the chocolate business, specifically craft chocolate. I would love to own my own farm and be involved in the process of production as well as selling it to customers.

This was probably my favorite day of the Agriculture block thus far, because I love chocolate so much and it was so incredibly interesting!